Sometimes I take morning walks. Down the sidewalk, past a garbage truck and flowers, stepping slowly, remembering myself as a presence in the morning, a kind of meditation. I feel stronger these days, but I also wake up with a sense of non-feeling, where my body feels like a shell, being held to confront others rather than to be with them. Let yourself feel I say, as I move through the open space of a sunny intersection. And a twinge of sadness flows in with the bright colors of the day, gentle and sweet. I continue to step, turn left where I enter the park, to go around the great field, and I remember the place of receiving. The blood body, a teacher at a movement workshop called it.. A trusting place, where your body softens and one allows the world to come through. Walking in this tender place I pass a lone tree, in the grass next to the community center, with sparse deep forest green and crinkled leaves. And a symbol comes that has spoken to me for years: the tree in the clearing. This image has always held a sense of magic for me that I didn’t understand. But today the world whispers, look they are all trees in clearings. Here the trees push up through sod, some small and propped and tagged with orange plastic around their feeble fingers, between their round leaves. These line the path. Beyond them a great being with a wide speckled trunk and a top that explodes rests next to the tennis court. Clumped, cramped, but each one rising up into its space of air, matter asserting itself into where-it-was-not. They are all trees in clearings, surrounded by the nada. I pass each one and the symbol begins to whisper to my conscious understanding: each is life, the body of the earth, dark and teeming, mysteriously arising from itself into this great intricate shape, soil and air joining to differentiate into rough grey bark, shapen leaves, veins, and branches, I cannot speak of the livingness of the tree. Intricacy from simplicity, the story of every form. I walk through the wet grass of a clump of pines and continue to the sidewalk, receiving them. Nature lives in the city. Let yourself fall into that place of receiving, your own softness. See how she chooses to speak to you, what secrets she will reveal.
